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Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!portal!cup.portal.com!DeadHead
From: DeadHead@cup.portal.com (Bruce M Ong)
Newsgroups: alt.fax,comp.periphs
Subject: Re: FAX products to be used in a SUN environment
Message-ID: <33521@cup.portal.com>
Date: 3 Sep 90 23:48:54 GMT
References: <2119@prles2.prl.philips.nl>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 58

>
>FINAL REMARK:
>
>There are very few products available which give a real SUN based solution.
>A lot of offered solutions depend completely or partly on a PC. The only
>real SUN solution I have had information on is the Bristol Group.
>

	I think PerfectByte - which makes sun peripherals - has a fax solution.
Check the latest Sun Observer or Sun Expert for their ads. 

	If you do look into PC based solution , you have to check out the
multi-channel cards, otherwise, you'll have to have a pc to host each card.
GammaFax CP cards are multi-channel cards (expensive but programmable). Dont
know much about the comlete pc card - I remember having to deal with these 
people because they didnt know how to write their TIFF tags right - hopefuly
they have corrected their tiff file problems. One problem with GammaLink CP 
is its real-time requirement: If you put 5 of them in the same chassis, and
you have all 5 of them transmit the same image in a PCNFS network directory,
mounted on a busy sun host, then you have a high probability of  not having 
your entire image transmitted through (yes folks, it drops half a page). The
symptom is  reproduceable if the image file is on a floppy disk.  Dont know
if they have fixed that problem.  The JTFAX card is nice in that it is 
completely memory-based. No io ports to deal with, no interrupts. You could
put quite few of these boards in chassis. But with MSDOS being single 
tasking, you'll have to write some TSR of your own to drive multiple cards, or
use some multi-tasker like DesqView - which will become a nightmare when you
have to network with the sun...

	Too bad nobody has done a real good multi-channel SBUS fax board...
surprising - with SBUS spec being so readily available  and good fax chips
(yamaha) out there... I mean, c'mon - real hardware hackers dont do Intel...
:)

	Oh, - if you do use a partial PC solution, you will have to worry about
bit orders and byte orders. GammaFax software does not read MSBfirst
tiff files, nor does it read msb->lsb bitorder tiff images. It does not
product a TIFF5.0 compliant tiff header (no # of scanlines in image, no
rows per strip), JTfax boards expect lsb->msb data. I suspect that's the case 
with most PC fax software.  If I were to make a decision, I would spend the
money to get a real sun solution, and save a million headaches later on.

	Bristol's stuff is quite cool - except their floating license stuff
is a pain (like framemaker's).

>If you have any comments on my remarks or additional information please
>respond to this net or directly to me.
>
>    __  __ __ __ Bert de Vries, ECHO Project
>   /_/ /_ /_/ /  Philips Research Labs, Project Centre Geldrop
>  /_/ /_ /\  /   Willem Alexanderlaan 7B, 5664 AN  Geldrop
>                 Phone: +31 40 892311 Fax: +31 40 892300
>                 Domain: bertv@pcg.philips.nl
>

bruce
deadhead@cup.portal.com
Robofax: coming to a store near you...